This article was originally printed in the December 2005 issue of Gramophone

As The Gramophone entered its second 'millennium', we offered a health-check for classical music and asked musicians, record industry executives and arts administrators to explain why they can't live without classical music.

ROGER WRIGHT

What better than to remember (in his centenary year) Michael Tippett's wonderful words that we are 'morally and emotionally enfeebled if we live our lives without artistic nourishment' and that 'in music we sense most directly the inner flow which sustains the soul'? Music is indeed, for me, the most powerful and subtle of all the arts in its power to stimulate, provoke and comfort us and make us question our existence — provided we are really listening!

Roger Wright is controller of BBC Radio 3

SUSAN TOMES

I don't claim that all classical music matters, or even that all of it matters to me. However, the best of it has more than mattered to me; it has been essential, helping me to digest life's experiences. It takes one's thoughts and feelings into a region beyond words, giving them depth and illumination. I'm fond of many kinds of music but outside classical music I haven't found the same ability to express layers of profound meaning and unexpected connections. Good classical music addresses the head, the heart and the spirit all at once, and can satisfy them all.

Susan Tomes is the pianist of the Florestan Trio who have recently released a disc of Mendelssohn for Hyperion

ANTONIO PAPPANO

In this world of labels and compartmentalisation, I am increasingly uncomfortable with the word 'classical' in front of the word 'music'. Music, from the most sentimental of melodies to the most primitive pounding rhythms, provokes and/or demands us to feel. Nostalgia, sensuality, danger, curiosity, triumph - classical music can do it all.

Antonio Pappano is music director of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden 

DARREN HENLEY

Without doubt classical music is the greatest of all musical genres. I believe passionately that it has the power to connect with people of all ages, classes and backgrounds up and down the country.

It has a unique spiritual quality which engages listeners in a far more deep and meaningful way than other types of music. Increasingly, we're seeing examples of new and exciting ways of presenting live music which make the genre accessible and relevant to new audiences. Despite what the doom-mongers would have you believe, classical music is flourishing.

Darren Henley is station manager of Classic FM 

JOHN ELIOT GARDINER

Classical music is a force to be reckoned with in one's life: ubiquitous and at times overpowering. Yet the more we are captivated by any single piece or composer, the more fugitive are the reasons why. Music leaves words struggling hopelessly in its wake. There are times when it can seem necessary to our very existence: music makes you feel that science and logic do not — cannot — map human life and emotion in its entirety. Listening to or playing a particular piece can provide a point of entry and a kind of 'reality' exposure to a realm of experience which no purely visual reconstruction can quite match for intensity. It links us to the (re-)creative process — the nearest many of us get to reconnecting with a pace and a rhythm different to the one which rules our everyday lives.

The conductor and writer Sir John Eliot Gardiner won this year's Classic FM/Gramophone Record of the Year for a disc of Bach sacred cantatas 

MARIN ALSOP

Listening to great music can transport us instantly to another time, another world, another culture, and connect us to other human beings on the highest emotional level. To join other people in a concert hall as members of a broader community to share in a journey of the imagination and emotions can be a unique and deeply moving experience. In a world as disjointed and anonymous as ours has become, this type of authentic, life-affirming experience is all the more poignant. Connecting with the greatness of the human spirit is both inspiring and reassuring, and we need to reinforce the transcendence of humanity.

Marin Alsop is principal conductor of the Bournemouth SO and music director designate of the Baltimore SO 

DANIEL HOPE

Classical music is our link to the past. It is our connection with centuries of the greatest musical ideas, philosophies and ways of life. This profoundly rich heritage has been bequeathed to us and it us our duty and obligation to ensure that it is passed on to future generations. By getting inside the mind of a Bach, a Beethoven, a Schubert or a Brahms, we learn so much, not just about the past, but about ourselves. We learn how music has the power to change, to encourage, to comfort, to move and, most importantly, to inspire.

Violinist Daniel Hope has recently recorded a disc of Bach concertos with the COE for Warner Classics

SUSAN GRAHAM

Without classical music, life would be dumb. As in, dumbed-down. Much current pop music is banal, predictable, anti-emotional.

I heard Strauss's Daphne recently, in a live performance at Carnegie Hall. More than once, I, a professional musician with over 15 years under my career belt, had goose bumps from the sheer depth of expression, turn of phrase, orchestration, and heartstopping power of acoustic sound. And that's just Strauss. In this short statement, I can't even address Mozart, Handel, Mahler, Wagner, Stravinsky or Bach. Classical music makes us aspire to our better, higher selves intellectually and emotionally. It gives dimension to our often one-dimensional lives.

Mezzo Susan Graham's latest release is 'Poêmes de l'amour', vocal works by Chausson, Ravel and Debussy 

KLAUS HEYMANN

Classical music, more than any other art form, can express an unlimited range of emotions and, at the same time, create these emotions in human beings. What other art form can make people unbelievably happy or unbelievably sad, with all shades in between? What can matter more than bringing happiness and enjoyment to a wide range of people from all walks of life and from many different cultures? Perhaps because it is capable of expressing the full range of human emotions the music of Mozart has become the most loved all over the world.

Klaus Heymann is the founder and CEO of Naxos

NICHOLAS KENYON

Music matters because it releases in us an immensely powerful creativity and spontaneity — something which is unpredictable, elemental, thrilling, but which can often struggle for recognition and reward in a world dominated by bottom lines and measurable targets.

A new generation of musicians wants to imagine as well as to inspire: for this year's BBC Proms, young players worked with professionals to create and perform a new piece for the Albert Hall, Invisible Lines: an inspirational moment that gave a massive hope for the future.

Nicholas Kenyon is director of the BBC Proms 

DAVID MELLOR

A great statesman once said 'a nation that does not respect its past has no future', and that is surely just as true in music. Classical music is quite simply the best of the past, the pieces with the quality to survive the winnowing fan of time. Classical music is everything that's best in music.

I'm not against pop music but there's no emotion pop music can stimulate that can't be even more deeply felt in the classics.

Journalist and broadcaster David Mellor hosts Mellor's Masterworks at noon on Sundays on Classic FM

CHRIS ROBERTS

Classical music, beyond being an art form, is a language without which we lose a connection to the past, present and future. It is a myth that classical music is dead or dying.

I have never known anyone, young or old, who, when presented with the music on neutral ground, did not 'feel' it or understand it regardless of being able to identify it.

Chris Roberts is president of Universal Classics & Jazz

STEVEN ISSERLIS

My interest in classical music is not for its social powers; music matters to me because it has enriched my life immeasurably for as long as I can remember. I love it for its ability to transport us to worlds far more beautiful and satisfying than anything in our daily lives. While doing so, it unites us and affects us in a positive way; I'm sure that no one has ever committed a serious crime while humming a Mozart aria!

So there are social benefits to classical music — but they are side issues. Music is music, and that's quite enough!

Cellist Steven Isserlis has recently released his second recording of the Brahms sonatas for Hyperion

ALEX ROSS

Classical music, so called, is an organism evolving furiously from year to year and day to day. The music that is ringing in my ears is John Adams's Doctor Atomic, which was finished in May of this year and first heard at the San Francisco Opera in October — a crypto-Wagnerian music drama about the creation of the atomic bomb, for which Adams has written some of the grandest, weirdest, most disturbingly beautiful music of his career. Masterpieces are still possible in our time, and some of the greatest works may be yet to come.

Alex Ross is music critic of the New Yorker 

JUDE KELLY

One of the deepest joys for me of classical music is the opportunity to have access to the thinking of all the world's greatest composers as they elevate our human chaos into musical landscapes of exquisite complexity and coherence. How bereft the world would be if classical music — with all its sublime offerings — were ever to wither away, leaving us no access to the minds of the great musical thinkers from each generation. But that will never happen — posterity guards us against our own mental laziness and constantly reminds us that without Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo or Balanchine we would have no sense of the fullness of our own humanity. Living or dead, great artists of all kinds reveal layers of meaning and patterns of thinking that continue to reverberate over centuries.

Jude Kelly is artistic director of the South Bank Centre, London, and chair of the arts, education and culture committee for the 2012 Olympics 

JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER

Classical music is as relevant today as ever. As politicians struggle, Daniel Barenboim has demonstrated how great music can unite nations with his inspirational WestEastern Divan orchestra comprising equal numbers of young Arab and Israeli musicians. With a span of at least six centuries, containing some of mankind's greatest achievements, classical music holds a unique place in our society. Elgar's music is inextricably linked with nature and

I would like to sit John Prescott down and play him a recording of Elgar's First Symphony in the hope that it might persuade him against yet further desecration of the English countryside.

Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber writes on music for the Daily Telegraph 

DONALD RUNNICLES

Albert Einstein once said, 'The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.' Classical music represents an apex of innovation inspired by the most original of instruments, the human voice. This supreme source was the catalyst of the imagination from which all other instruments were drawn and the music that is created has the power to challenge the imagination further yet, beyond its outermost realm. It is an invitation, an opportunity for all those who create it and all those who experience it to move and be moved. It is an invitation to PO bring the imagination to life. I am seized by any music that challenges the fabric of my understanding: any music that incites a forward motion into the unknown is di music that wholly captivates my attention.

Donald Runnicles is music director of San Francisco Opera and in October conducted the world premiere of John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic 

PETER MAXWELL DAVIES

Classical music is unique, in that its grammar, syntax and formal construction present an abstract discourse in time roughly equivalent to that of the most ambitious architecture in space, in which thematic material of contrasting functions is subjected to variation, development and transformation in organically consistent ways, with the tonic of the home key providing a sense of direction over large spans of dine — not least harmonically — making multi-dimensionality possible in time, with an ever-changing focus between foreground, middle-ground and background, which as a vanishing point enables this to happen in space. This has no equivalent throughout civilisation.

Master of the Queen's Music Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's 'Naxos' String Quartet No 7 was premiered in October at the Wigmore Hall, London 

CLIVE GILLINSON

Perhaps the clearest demonstration that classical music matters was the forcible attempt to eliminate it in China during the Cultural Revolution. Throughout that period, classical music all but disappeared, although many extraordinary people risked their lives to hide scores, instruments and recordings. Since the end of that terrifying and destructive era, there has been what can only be described as an explosion in the popularity of classical music in China. Within a mere 30 years, remarkable Chinese performers and composers have become central to the world of classical music, and Chinese culture is becoming inextricably linked with the future development of classical music, as has been the case with so many of the world's great cultures. In addition, China TV recently launched a 24 hour classical music station! Not only does this tragic 'controlled experiment in elimination' demonstrate just how much classical music matters, it also clearly shows that it speaks to the human spirit across all cultures, and belongs to the whole world.

Former MD of the London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Clive Gillinson is executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, New York 

HERVÈ BOISSILRE 

Classical is a long-term music — we listen to it several centuries on, so I don't see any reason why it shouldn't continue. It's good music, quality music, and people feel this. For those who began buying records in the 1960s, tastes change and evolve. They still love The Beatles and the Beach Boys, but as they mature they look for something that brings not only the power of rock but something else, too. Though we at Naïve don't really talk about classical, or pop, or jazz — we talk about the artists. Categories are becoming more flexible, more and more open, so to keep classical in a specific category is a big mistake.

Nerve Boissiére is director of Naive Classique

MATT HAIMOVITZ

Classical music matters because music matters.

Music provokes us, inspires us, moves us to a more acute understanding of our own nature.

Whether the monophonic meditations of Hildegard, the polyphonous layers of Palestrina or a Bach fugue, the vivid conversation of a Haydn string quartet, the utopian vision of a Beethoven symphony, or folk and popular culture filtered into the compositions of BartOk or David Sanford, composers and performers from the classical tradition have absorbed and contributed to the socio-political atmosphere of their time and, through the most abstract and direct means — music — paved the way for some of the greatest achievements of the human imagination. Recently, performing Bach's Cello Suites in COthen — where Bach composed these masterpieces — I was flanked by two busts: in front of me Prince Leopold, a ruler who patronised music and musicians, and behind me the head of JS Bach. A wonderful metaphor: today, very few of us know anything about Prince Leopold, but hundreds of years later most of us know the name and have been touched by the music of Bach. Through changing political winds and the gulf of time, it is the composers we remember and revere.

Matt Haimovitz has released a recording of Bach's cello suites for his own label, Oxingale 

ALAN GILBERT

Classical music is one of the highest expressions of our humanity — it defines us and tells so much about who we are and what makes life worth living. Classical music is as neces sary to our happiness, inspiration and understanding of life as the paintings of a great artist like Van Gogh or a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon. Conducting Britten's Peter Grimes at Santa Fe

Opera this past summer was one of the highlights of the season for me. This is simply one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, a stunning piece of music and a powerful piece of theatre.

Alan Gilbert is chief conductor and artistic advisor to the Royal Stockholm PO, music director of Santa Fe Opera and principal guest conductor of the NDR SO

JOHN TUSA 

Think of a world without the joys of Rossini, the consolations of Schubert, the ambiguities of Mozart, the austerities of Stravinsky, the complexities of Birtwistle, the diversions of Ligeti. No, don't; it would be too awful to endure. For at least 1000 years, from medieval plainchant to Renaissance polyphony, through two Viennese schools and on to contemporary minimalism, 'classical music' has demonstrated a continuing ability to adapt, form and reform itself, and divert into new codes, disciplines and shapes. Throughout this time 'classical music' has remained universal in its language, extending its reach globally in a remarkable way. If it wasn't also about exhilaration, exaltation, anguish, despair and pathos, it would not have survived or deserved to.

Sir John Tusa is managing director of London's Barbican Centre.